“... of his uncle being a farm-labourer, or the blighted life of the intelligent, radical cobbler John Antell who married into the family. Instead, Hardy exaggerates the scale of the Rockhampton cottage where he was born, his father’s status in the social scale (he attributes his comparative lack of success in the building business to his being by nature ...”

“... circuit, but he was less familiar with the recording studio. He was ‘terrible’, his producer John Hammond recalled: ‘Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike.’ But in another sense he knew just what he was doing. The album was made in just six hours of studio time – two three-hour sessions – at a cost of around ...”

“... scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries – prominent among them Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister, as well as Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. Mummy continued to be dispensed well into the 18th century, when Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis (1747) advised: Mummy resolves coagulated Blood, and is said to be effectual in ...”

“... it would need Europe to control its own reconstruction. For instance, if a Tuscan farmer wanted a John Deere tractor, he could pay for it directly in lire. The local Marshall Aid committee would co-ordinate the purchase: the lire went to the Italian government, which could use it for reconstruction, while the Marshall Aid dollars would be paid to ...”

“... conservatives.In the swing state of Pennsylvania (the fifth most populous in the country), John Fetterman, a left-leaning Democrat and a strong supporter of marijuana legalisation and criminal justice reform, defeated a Trump-backed candidate, Mehmet Oz, by 4.6 percentage points, outperforming Biden’s result in the state in 2020; the Democratic ...”

“... be asked and complaints pursued and (sometimes) compensation obtained without going to law. Arthur Taylor’s useful essay contrasts the reasonably swift and productive hospital complaints procedure with the often complicated and frustrating family health service procedure when the complaint is against a GP. He looks also at the Health Service ombudsman, whose ...”

“... University, where the novel stages a postdated, highly fanciful version of Derrida’s clash with John Searle and pushes the boat out still further on the story’s farcical and shaggy-dog aspects. Methodological tensions play out like scuffles between the Jets and the Sharks: ‘You analytic pricks!’ ‘Take your Derrida boys and piss ...”

“... to name only a few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate at Westminster or Whitehall. Since ...”

“... very hostile to any form of sex before marriage; James Mill had ‘a neurotic aversion to sex’; John Stuart Mill was ambivalent, but an early supporter of contraception; Bentham defended sexual pleasure while advocating abstention, and expressed himself in favour of both concubinage and – uniquely – of tolerance for homosexuality; Harriet ...”

“... left enduring scars, especially on the left of British politics. In The Politics of the Judiciary John Griffith provides more recent material to support his thesis that a white, male, Oxbridge-educated judicial élite is not to be trusted to decide the questions which would arise if we had a modern Bill of Rights, broadly defining the limits of state ...”

“... could order the fragments in her own way; but even this seems rather too programmatic, a bit too John Cage. It is certainly better to dip into the book than to read it through – one of the many endearing things about Pessoa is that he makes conscientiousness seem silly – and the fragments should be read as a series of bulletins, without assuming one ...”

“... illusion that Burke was the lackey of the rich and powerful. From first to last, he stuck up for John Wilkes and the cause of liberty. He drily recognised Wilkes’s failings: ‘There has been no hero of the mob but Wilkes’; ‘He is not ours, and if he were, is little to be trusted. He is a lively agreeable man, but of no prudence and no ...”

“... Shelley, who clearly understood that he was to see it through the press, but the nervous publisher John Murray preferred the politically safe editorial hand of William Gifford. The material censored by Murray and Gifford now appears in full, and McGann is right to point to the enhancement of Childe Harold as one of the great contributions of his edition so ...”

“... audiences in a student touring production or that, as a child, she came second to Elizabeth Taylor for the lead role in National Velvet. When that gift for performance is combined with profound democratic convictions – with the belief, which she surely has, that she speaks for a common good above the interests of party or class – the impact can be ...”

“... and the comparison of characters with literary and artistic figures: Carson McCullers, Elizabeth Taylor, Romy Schneider, Maigret.Le Cheval blanc d’Uffington deals with an author who has secluded herself on an island to avoid strong sensation, choosing to write about the world instead of experiencing it. ‘For a year, I had incessantly questioned myself as ...”